Short answer: Montana attorney advertising is governed by Rules 7.1 through 7.5 of the Montana Rules of Professional Conduct, with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel investigating and the Commission on Practice adjudicating for the Montana Supreme Court. Montana’s distinguishing feature is structural rather than substantive: Montana does not adopt the explanatory comments that accompany the ABA Model Rules and that most states carry alongside their own. This guide sets out the Montana attorney advertising rules that apply to a law firm website, and how to reason about one when the interpretive layer everyone else leans on is not there.
Most compliance advice is quietly built on the comments. Montana is the state where you find out how much.
What is missing, and why it is load-bearing
Open almost any guide to attorney advertising and follow where the specifics come from. The rule text is short and general. The examples, the distinctions, the treatment of lead generators, the discussion of trade names, the observation that a firm may be designated by a distinctive website address — nearly all of that lives in comments.
Comments are not rules. Even where a state adopts them they are interpretive aids, not obligations. But they do enormous practical work, because they are how a general prohibition on misleading communications becomes advice about a specific page.
Montana’s rules stand without that apparatus. The prohibition is there. The worked examples are not. So a Montana firm cannot answer a website question by finding the paragraph that addresses it, and a national compliance checklist — which is very often a comment restated as a requirement — is doing something subtly wrong when it is applied to Montana.
The two failure modes
Firms respond to this in one of two ways, and both are mistakes.
Treating the absence as permission. The reasoning goes: nothing addresses testimonials, therefore testimonials are unregulated. But the general prohibition is not narrower for lacking illustrations. A misleading communication is misleading whether or not a comment anticipated the format. If anything, the absence of a comment removes the safe harbour rather than the standard — the same point we made about deregulation in the Virginia guide, arrived at from a different direction.
Importing another state’s comments as if they were Montana’s. More common, and harder to spot, because it usually happens inside a tool. A checklist built from ABA commentary reports a Montana firm as non-compliant with something that is not a Montana requirement, or reassures it about a distinction Montana has not drawn. The output looks authoritative either way.
How to reason about a page without commentary
Working from the rule text alone is a different discipline, and it is a better one than most firms are used to. Three questions do most of the work.
What does this element assert? Not what it says — what a reader takes from it. A badge asserts a credential. A star rating asserts a quality judgement. A results figure asserts a capability. A stock photograph of a courtroom asserts trial experience. Write the assertion out as a sentence, because an element you cannot reduce to a sentence is usually asserting something you have not examined.
Is the assertion true, and is it true in the way the reader will take it? This is where truthful statements fail. The claim survives the first half and not the second.
Could you show your working? If the assertion were put to you in a letter asking for the basis, is there one? Not a defence — a basis.
| Approach | What it relies on | Where it fails in Montana |
|---|---|---|
| National compliance checklist | ABA comments restated | Tests requirements Montana has not adopted |
| Copying a bigger firm’s site | Another state’s rules | Inherits assumptions silently |
| “No comment on it, so it is fine” | Absence of guidance | The general prohibition still applies |
| Reasoning from the rule text | The rule itself | Slower, and correct |
| Ethics counsel on the specific page | Montana authority | The reliable route |
Where Montana firms should actually look
The absence of adopted comments does not mean an absence of guidance. The State Bar of Montana’s Ethics Committee issues opinions, and those are addressed to Montana’s rules rather than to a model. Disciplinary decisions are the other source, and they have the advantage of being about real conduct rather than hypotheticals.
The point is where you go first. In a state with adopted comments the sequence is rule, then comment, then opinion. In Montana the middle step is missing, which makes the ethics opinion more important and makes a phone call to counsel about a genuinely novel page more sensible than it would be elsewhere.
There is also a practical consolation. Reasoning from the rule text produces better websites than checklist compliance does, because it forces you to articulate what each element claims. Most of the elements that fail that exercise were not earning their place anyway.
Montana attorney advertising rules: frequently asked questions
Which rules govern attorney advertising in Montana?
The Montana Rules of Professional Conduct, Rules 7.1 through 7.5, covering communications concerning a lawyer’s services, advertising, solicitation, communication of fields of practice and specialization, and firm names and letterheads. The Office of Disciplinary Counsel investigates and the Commission on Practice makes recommendations to the Montana Supreme Court.
Does Montana really have no comments to its rules?
Montana has not adopted the explanatory comments in the way many states have. That is a point worth confirming against the current rules as published by the Montana Supreme Court and the State Bar of Montana before relying on it for any particular question, and it is exactly the kind of structural detail that a national summary gets wrong.
Can a Montana firm rely on ABA commentary for guidance?
It can be read as persuasive background, which is different from treating it as a statement of Montana’s requirements. The risk is a checklist that converts commentary into a compliance obligation without anyone noticing the conversion happened.
Does the lack of comments make Montana more permissive?
Not in the way firms hope. The general prohibition on false or misleading communications applies with full force; what is missing is the illustrative material that would tell you in advance how it applies to a specific format.
Does Montana require advertising to be filed or retained?
This guide does not state Montana’s current filing or record-retention position, because requirements of that kind change and are easy to describe out of date. Some third-party marketing sites assert a submission requirement for Montana; confirm the current position with the State Bar of Montana or the Office of Disciplinary Counsel rather than relying on a secondary summary.
Montana attorney advertising rules: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: whatever compliance guidance you are working from, find out whether the specific requirement you are relying on comes from a rule or from a comment. In most states that distinction is academic. In Montana it decides whether the requirement exists. And when the answer is that it came from a comment, you are back to the only question the rule actually asks — what does this page claim, and is it true in the way a reader will take it.
Official source: the State Bar of Montana.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states that any particular website element is permitted or prohibited in Montana, and the structure of Montana’s rules should be confirmed against the current official text. Confirm current requirements with the State Bar of Montana, the Office of Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Attorney Advertising Rules by State, plus the Virginia, Idaho and Maine guides.
